Tag
This Year
Articles and publications tagged This Year across the Atmosphere.
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Articles
Publications
June 10 - Dilaudid
Everything about listening to this makes me tense in the best way. The staccato strings and the urgent nature of the lyrics add up to the feeling of something constrained, desperate, vulnerable, and passionate. This song has some of John's best lyrical content, moving effortlessly from the urgent paranoia of the world going wrong to the horny desperation of an early girlfriend where lust is taking over from love, and the way these two things crash into each other. it's a song of fumbled encounte...This Year
June 9 - Scavenger Babies
It's never not going to be a good time when you have a rolling guitar, John in trembling voice, and a list of things to do. A good John List Song feels like a properly conducted ritual. These are the things that make you good or pure or proper or maybe just will reduce the feeling of dread in your heart for five minutes. This is both an odd song and a perfectly sensible song to drop in Sunset Tree Month. This is how you keep it together afterwards. This is how you stay as the person you became. ...This Year
June 8 - Broom People
I mean, shit. I have coherent things to say about this song, but friends who don't have a clue, well meaning teachers is a fucking novel in a line. Solace in a chaotic life, beauty in the wild and the cold, rage and despair turning into power through pressure and releasing in the right places. The transformative power of having someone who care when nobody did.This Year
June 7th - Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod
If Song For My Stepfather is John's pain at its most naked, this is perhaps John's pain at its most transubstantiated. Both songs describe blunt and unforgivable violence upon a child, but the points of view and the way the reality of it are processed couldn't be more different. This song, and its huge and soaring organs, aren't about the violence that was experienced, painful and traumatic though it was. This song is about the not the consolation that it might end but the consolation that one d...This Year
June 6 - Magpie
The most consciously folksy song on a not-very-folksy album, and one of the only ones to fit the Mountain Goats trope of list of things you must do which is one of my favourite tropes. Remember what we had here when there was something left to save is the kind of line that I'm always going to regret not being good enough to write myself. This is a song about reckoning, and scavenging, and paying prices that might well be too bad. There's no reasoning with the magpie, he will take what he takes a...This Year
June 5 - Song For My Stepfather
This small beautiful song, a simple chard structure, a voice and a guitar, is the purest distillation of everything that John elaborates and explores in The Sunset Tree. It's quite shockingly painful, a story of smallness, helplessness, and the places people go in their heads when bad things happen. It's no wonder to me at all that this didn't make the album. My understanding is that John plays it from time to time to keep it alive, but I can't imagine the pain that playing this every night on a...This Year
June 4 - Dance Music
This gorgeous song is two vignettes of two different types of trauma. Both told in the same stream of consciousness moment-of life style, as if jumping straight into a memory already in progress. The first and simplest is about the fear of physical harm: harm to the self, harm to a loved one, from the moster living in the house. Here the dance music coming from the record player is escape and guilt and shelter all at once. The second is more complex, although it's built on the trauma of the firs...This Year
June 2 - You Or Your Memory
God, this is going to be a month. The first thing to note about this song is that by the standards of the Mountain Goats it's incredibly simple. A narrative without allusion, without hiding. The events of a young man in pain contemplating something. The rest of the album is there to explain how he got here, but this song is painfully simple and to the point. The second thing to note about this song is that it's basically fucking perfect. A rolling, almost sweet song that carefully packages how d...This Year
May 31 - Porcile
End of the month, time for a rarity, and this feels very much like a song that acts as a portent of times yet to come. The conceit of this song is that it's written from the point of view of a person who is changing into a pig, and the violence they unleash upon themselves in trying to cope with it. A simple theme we've heard a thousand times before as I'm sure you'll agree. The part where this sing feels like a portent is in its fear of violence. The idiot, caught in accident, expecting punishm...This Year
May 30 - Cotton
Is whimsical catharsis a thing? This song is light and beautiful and soft, a gentle account of the things we hang onto, the memories that pain us, the scabs we pick at, the guilt we tend and maintain, and an easy instruction to do the hardest thing possible. Leave it behind. It's not forgiveness per se, it's not even forgetting. It's just... not hanging onto things.This Year
May 29 - Rose Quarter Drifting / We Shall All Be Healed
This is a fragment, an unreleased song that only exists in versions from radio stations and live shows. And as such it's easy to see the ideas that started here and came out later. The line stared down demons, came back breathing felt like a preview of You Were Cool or Spent Gladiator 1. And those are two of my absolute favourites. This is a song about being a ghost, about visiting ghosts. About going back to old places, which is not something you can ever actually do. There's a town I can never...This Year
May 28 - Against Pollution
I don't know if there's such a thing as a stadium anthem of eschatological nihilism, but if there is, that's this song. A huge and momentous sound to this song, coupled with lyrics that start with a narrow focus of the mundane and horrifying, but can't help but look up to see vast and impossible futures. This is a song of redemption. Of viewing ourselves and our actions in their total form, from a perspective we can't imagine. Once you're through the nihilism it's a song of trust and hope. We wi...This Year
May 27 - Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph
This song is two things. First of all, it's a song played on a bus while someone is being taken to jail. Second of all, it's a song of the heart and of triumph. We Shall All Be healed is a remarkable and powerful album, but it's also kind of a beginning-to-end bummer. It's an album about addiction and the ways people survive it and don't, and neither of those options comes without pain. it's possible to sing beautifully about pain, but pain is also exhausting. This book of days isn't in strict o...This Year
May 26 - Home Again Garden Grove
A rolling boil of paranoia, this is a song about scoring. The mania and the on-edge nature of looking desperately for something, caught in the rabid simplicity of needing your fix and nothing else. Everything about the song here, from the lyrics to the instrumentation to the mix, is a set of spiky lines where nothing comfortable can happen. One of the reasons I started doing this blog, started following John Darnielle's music from its earliest forms through whatever came after, is how utterly un...This Year
May 25 - Mole
Sometimes the simplicity and audacity of a song just wash over you. Mole is a simple, tiny melody, a story of an addict going to visit another addict in a hospital bed that had been gained via misadventure. Small and sad and kept afloat by a false hope of better times. And then the tidal wave of the middle movement hits you, and all the chaos that is being carefully kept out rushes through the song uncontrollably and everything is enormous piano and uncontrolled noise. And then it's quiet and sm...This Year
May 24 - Your Belgian Things
So, going to start by looking at the musicality here. This is an absolute joy of a mid century ballad. The way the guitar and bass and piano wrap around each other and the repeated poetic refrains. I can't imagine exactly what the musical this came from would be, but it would absolutely make me cry. What a mature, subtle, sensitive piece of music. And now the lyrics. John exists deep in a landscape of metaphor and imagery, and this is all about absence and traces and the things we leave behind i...This Year
May 23 - Letter From Belgium
A really gorgeous post-punk sound to this one, and a style of song that has a number of my favourite features of Mountain Goats songs. I've never done methamphetamine. For so many reasons. One of the more minor ones is that someone once descibed the feeling of it to me as like you've stayed up until 3AM and burned past the fatigue only that's the best feeling in the world and I can't actually think of many things I'd like less. Nonetheless the sound of this song is the sound that I imagine from ...This Year
May 22 - Hommel West
This Year
May 21 - Butter Teeth
Still in the We Shall All Be Healed headspace, this is a b-side from a Mountain Goats single and also a quiet and assured banger. The rhyme scheme and melody are the sketch of an idea that will one day become Lovecraft In Brooklyn (more on that later), and the song itself is a slow almost leisurely exploration of the mania of an amphetamine high., This is the up, the point where everything is forward, you have been launched into gear by a substance hitting your brain and while it's there you are...This Year
May 20 - Linda Blair Was Born Innocent
We've hit another pre-existing favourite. The opening line of this has been following me around online for like fifteen years now. And when the strings come in at the line hungry for love, ready to drown this song flies. There's something about a sing about desperate lost youth who are doomed but still celebrating. There is a joy in nihilism. As Willow Nightingale tells us, nothing matters, smile anyway.This Year
May 19 - All up The Seething Coast
This is the sound of the high, the sound of contented paranoia. This whole album is about the things people go through during addiction, and this is about the worst part: the pleasure. From the droning guitar to the half spoken lyrics, this is the sound of lethargy masquerading as contentment. There's an Irvine Welsh line in Trainspotting about one of the pleasures of junk being that it simplifies everything. You're not worried about your car or your house or your girlfriend or the guy living on...This Year
May 18 - Slow West Vultures
My god, this song is huge. The soundscape is vast, the lyrics cryptic and visionary, everything about it is the overture for a statement of strangeness and desperation and hope. This is a sing by a slightly older man from the perspective of his younger self, viewing nihilism from the outside, singing about the future without imagining he would be in it. The lyrics here are sly and cynical and hu7morous and angry at the slivers of hope within. There's a maturity to this that is about more than ju...This Year
May 16 - Beat The Devil
So we're in the heyday of songs about smuggling, then. This is tense and lyrical, an ode to the emotions of doing something unwise and uncertain because you have to and you want to and it's the only way to get money. This is a dark song about hope, or maybe a bright song about ongoing despair. You want the narrator to succeed, and you know that on any even medium timeline he won't. And that the best and least likely outcome is that he gets out and does something else and finds a way to deal with...This Year
March 15 - Duane Allman Slept Here
This song is smoky and slow and tired. The lyrics in this, the live version, possibly the only version, are tired and strange and doubt themselves. And it's amazing It is what it sounds like. A song about burning yourself out of your own mind. I got five minutes sleep, it was an accident.This Year